Review: 'Unto Us a Son is Given'

©2019 All Rights Reserved TheLitForum.com Reviews

Unto Us a Son is Given
By Donna Leon
Crime fiction
March 2019
Atlantic Monthly Press
ISBN: 978-0802129116

Donna Leon continues to explore ambiguity in human emotions and how situations develop into life-changing decisions in her latest Brunetti novel. This time, the exploration centers on family ties, including new ones and those that last throughout the years.

Unto Us a Son is Given centers on the concern Brunetti's father-in-law, Count Falier, has for one of his oldest friends. Gonzalo Rodriguez de Tejada is a long-retired art world mover and shaker who no longer has that world's respect. But he does have a much younger man in his life and wants to adopt this man to be his son. That would mean inheriting his still considerable estate. The count and others are aghast at his plan. Brunetti is more in the live-and-let-live camp, and doesn't understand the fuss. But he will do a little looking into the young man's bona fides to ease his father-in-law's concerns.

But that's not how the world works. Before much is discovered, Gonzalo suddenly drops dead on the street while away from home. As his older friends gather for a memorial service to honor his friend, someone else dies. This time, it's murder.

As is usual when visiting Brunetti, the ruminations and philosophy are draws. This time, the good commissario ponders prejudices acknowledged and unconscious. How do any of them feel about each other if there is a label attached? And if the prejudicial beliefs were true, how deep would they go? How far would they extend? What about criminals in general? Are they born this way? Because this is Brunetti, he makes connections between these lines of thought and Calvinists and Greek tragedies he is now reading again for the first time in years.

Is there predestination? Do the gods dictate someone's journey? And how does revenge, or justice, tie into all of this?

Heady ideas, but ones that are tied to the deaths in this book, the 28th Brunetti novel. As Guido himself notes in this book, how can a writer make something horrific not, well, beautiful, but rather powerful? That's what Leon does here. Families, love and how we feel underlie this whodunit.

©2019 All Rights Reserved TheLitForum.com Reviews and reprinted by permission

Review: 'The Temptation of Forgiveness'

The Temptation of Forgiveness
By Donna Leon
Crime fiction
March 2018
Atlantic Monthly Press
ISBN: 978-0802127754

The lens through which one views something can be affected by many factors -- including one's experience, who one trusts, where one was born and grew up, one's gender. Each of these lenses plays a role in The Temptation of Forgiveness, in which Guido Brunetti has to grapple with decisions that greatly affect the lives of others.

Brunetti's extremely talented colleague, Signora Elettra, is troubled by internal reports of leaks. Usually unflappable, she is bothered by the talk and, unusually for her, the ongoing office politics. At the same time, a colleague of Brunetti's wife comes to see him. Reluctantly, she admits she is worried about her teenage son. She has decided he is using drugs and the police should do something about it.

Then a man is found in the night near a bridge with a horrendous head wound. His recovery is doubtful. Brunetti realizes the victim is the husband of his wife's fellow professor.

Was the attack on him related to his wife's concerns for their son? With no other apparent motives, and a wife who isn't forthcoming with information, Brunetti sets out to see what he can discover.

Leon uses these events, and what would appear to be a logical progression in a police investigation, to delve into far more subtle affairs. Claudia Griffoni, Brunetti's esteemed fellow officer, is from Naples and sees things from a different angle than her two male Venetian colleagues. Brunetti and Griffoni come close to arguing about another case. They don't agree about a Muslim father who killed his daughter when he thought she had been carrying on with boys, and who now says he wants to die after discovering he was wrong. Without making a judgment call as the author, Leon instead shows all the different ways the two officers look at the situation.

This idea of different perspectives extend to both Brunetti's home, where he is re-reading Antigone, and to the case at hand. The classic play has Brunetti wondering if the lead character is right or wrong -- it depends on whether one views the king's decree as absolute or whether honoring family matters most.

When Brunetti, Griffoni and their colleague Vianello put their heads together, some will jump to conclusions. Some will think they are using logic when they are only able to view the situation in one way. In the end, Brunetti will find his way to a solution, but whether he makes the right decisions at the end could be questioned. It all depends on what lens one uses to view the situation.

This is a rich, nuanced and deeply engaging story. Donna Leon continues to present a beloved city, even if the lenses are not rose-colored, and characters who continue to surprise even long-time readers.


©2018 All Rights Reserved TheLitForum.com Review and posted with permission

Review: 'Earthly Remains'

©2017 All Rights Reserved TheLitForum.com

Earthly Remains
By Donna Leon
Crime Fiction
April 2017
Atlantic Monthly Press
ISBN: 978-0802126474

To protect a younger colleague from saying something he shouldn't in a case with political implications, Commissario Guido Brunetti fakes a heart condition. To his surprise, he is advised at the hospital to take some time off to recuperate in Donna Leon's 26th novel in the series, Earthly Remains. Brunetti realizes he should take a step away from his work.

His wife's family holdings include a villa on one of the largest islands in the laguna. There, he connects with an older man who knew Brunetti's father and who takes him rowing in a boat he built himself. Brunetti and Davide Casati quickly form one of those easy-going male friendships that is respectful of the other's privacy. Casati, the villa's caretaker, spends much of his time rowing and tending to beehives located throughout the laguna. He mourns his wife, who suffered before dying of cancer, and spends some time with his daughter and her family. But it is the rowing, the bees and the mourning that occupy most of Casati's time and heart.

It is the death of bees at several hives that appears to be a tipping point for Casati. He tells Brunetti his wife's death is his fault and he is going to go talk to her. Casati disappears.

In tracing Casati's life backward from the time he left a factory and became a caretaker and beekeeper, Brunetti encounters other people who together weave a story of legacy. When someone leaves this life, what will be his earthly remains? What of the earth will remain? As Casati asks Brunetti, "Do you think somme of the things we do can never be forgiven?"

Leon has a light touch when bringing conclusions into the story. It is the questioning, and the wanting to consider the possible answers to the questions, that form the strong underpainting in her work.

As our hero ponders:

Brunetti had spent much of his reading life amidst the minds and convictions of people who had lived thousands of years ago, and he had learned not to laugh at their ideas but to try to understand why they thought the way they did. After all, his own world lived in constant discovery of its own ignorance.

The contrast in characters, their motives and their fates is fascinating and provokes curiosity. Seeing the choices each character made in the past, and how it has impacted their present and the future of others, is one of the most rewarding aspects of Earthly Remains.

The most rewarding aspect, however is the time spent with Brunetti and Paola, Brunetti's colleagues and the Brunetti library.

©2017 All Rights Reserved TheLitForum.com and republished here with permission

Review: 'The Waters of Eternal Youth'

The Waters of Eternal Youth (a Commissario Guido Brunetti mystery)
By Donna Leon
Crime fiction
March 2016
Atlantic Monthly Press
ISBN: 978-0802124807

Past, present and future, family and strangers all play roles in Donna Leon's latest Commissario Guido Brunetti novel, The Waters of Eternal Youth, working together for a subtly enriching, always engaging reading experience.

Brunetti is roped along with his wife to a formal dinner for a Venetian preservation charity dear to the heart of a friend of her family. The aristocratic patroness commands his presence for a later interview. She is old and there is something from the past she wishes to have settled. Many years ago, a beautiful teenage girl -- a Venetian afraid of the water -- fell into a canal one night. She was starting to drown but was saved by a passerby. The man who saved her, an alcoholic, thinks she was pushed but can remember nothing specific. Who he was is unclear. The girl was the aristocrat's granddaughter, and she has been trapped in a child's mind ever since. Before the grandmother dies, she wants to know the truth.

What can Brunetti find out? Was a crime committed? Is there any way to go back 15 years to find out? If so, is there any way to bring anyone responsible to justice?

Reluctantly drawn to the older woman's story, Brunetti will see what he can find out. This includes seeing what the ever-resourceful Elettra can find out. This most remarkable woman is on a quest of her own regarding electronic goings-on. Brunetti also enlists the aid of another policewoman with previously unknown skills of her own, Griffoni, who plays a key role in moving things along.

At the same time, Brunetti is disturbed to discover new refugees are starting to bother the girls outside school, including his daughter. They're far too aggressive for his taste. It's a small part of the story that echoes when, for example, during one of Brunetti's classic musings, he notes why other people's prejudices sound far more worse than our own. And the realization disturbs him. He and Paola have serious discussions, there is serious cooking, the children are nearly grown and definitely their own people, and, as ever, Venice is an integral part of each character and the story itself.

The kind of a person someone is, despite status, career or goals reached, is part of the characteristic climax of the novel. Donna Leon excels at carving out small, significant moments of grace and dignity in addition to a clear-eyed look at political and personal corruption and other failings.

The Waters of Eternal Youth, as Brunetti looks into what happened to a teenage girl years ago, uses those small moments to create an enormously satisfying ending. And because it's Donna Leon, the ending is handled just right. What a marvelous book.


©2016 All Rights Reserved CompuServe Books Review and reprinted with permission

Review: 'Carnival for the Dead'

CARNIVAL FOR THE DEAD
By David Hewson
Suspense
August 2012
Thomas & Mercer
ISBN: 9781612183985

David Hewson's Nic Costa novels of Rome feature strong plots and strong characters. Among the strongest of the secondary characters is police pathologist Teresa Lupo. However, when she goes to Venice during Carnival to search for her beloved aunt, who is missing, she may be at her most vulnerable because she is out of her element.

Teresa's Aunt Sofia has always lived as a vagabond. Even Teresa's mother doesn't know the kind of details that families usually know that prove helpful in, say, missing persons reports. When Teresa contacts the police, she is met with little sympathy. Her aunt is a grown woman with no diminished capacity and it's Carnival. The police have a lot of other things going on.
                                                                                                                                                 
Staying at her aunt's flat, Teresa mets the neighbors, a young woman who makes masks for the other main occupant, an older man confined to a wheelchair. The owner is rarely there. The neighbors, although nice, especially for Venetians to Teresa's Roman mind, know little that is helpful. When Teresa finds an envelope slipped under the apartment door with a story, she learns that this and subsequently delivered stories are supposed to lead her to Sofia.

Hewson is a master at weaving these stories, which feature Teresa and other people she meets, with the real story of her search for Sofia. The stories include a British professor and a young Englishman who is a master baker, who both end up in Venice, and a woman who resembles Sofia's neighbor Camille, but with an odd need for nutrients in other people's blood. Carnival season and the narrow, twisty streets of Venice add layers of mystery to the novel; this is not the Venice of a traveller's delight, but rather a dark place where people's obsessions become overpowering.

The stories also feature the enigmatic Count St. Germain, who is based loosely on a real person who was as mysterious as the one in Hewson's story. Readers who know of a St. Germain through Chelsea Quinn Yarbro's groundbreaking series of historical paranormals or in Diana Gabaldon's stories will recognize this figure, even though he is not the same character.

When the stories Teresa has been receiving and her investigation merge into one storyline, there is the usual over-the-top action seen in most thrillers. But Hewson does make everything fit together without jamming it into place. And there is sweetness along with the bitter in the telling.

The main result of reading the novel, however, is to want to spend more time with Hewson's Nic Costa series and see Teresa Lupo back where she belongs.

The novel was not published by Hewson's regular publisher but rather by the Amazon imprint Thomas & Mercer.

©2012 All Rights Reserved CompuServe Books Reviews and reprinted with permission